All Schema Markup For Local Businesses

All Schema Markup For Local Businesses

First, what is schema markup?

Schema markup is basically pieces of code that you add to your website to let Google (and other search engines) gather information about your website and business that it might not have been able to without it.

Schema markups main benefit is that it can be used to make your website listing on Google stand out more. This is because your listing is more eye-catching or takes up more space in Google. With it, you have a higher chance of someone clicking through to your website.

For example, as you can see in the image below metropolitianplumbing.com.au stands out more from their competitor melbourne24hourplumbing.com.au because they have star ratings displayed on their Google listing.

Those star ratings are there because of the schema markup metropolitianplumbing.com.au have added to their website.

In this post, I’ll cover all the different types of schema markup your local businesses website will need and show you various ways to implement each type, starting with the rating schema markup you see above.

While you don’t need all the schema markups I have listed below, you should at least as a minimum have the first 3 to stand out from the crowd on Googles search results page.

Note:

There are 4 different ways you can add schema markup to your website. You can either use microdata, RDFa, JSON or some sort of plugin.

In this post to keep things simple, I will cover the easiest ways to implement each schema markup type into your website using non-technical terms for better understanding.

If you have come here to learn one specific markup you can use the navigation below.

Ratings And Reviews, Product/ Service Markup

As promised I’ll start off with the schema markup I showed you in the intro.

What it does: Shows the star ratings in Google. Here is the image again just to refresh your memory.

Important notes:

While the exact number of reviews and average rating isn’t checked by Google directly, you must be honest. If you claim to have 134 reviews all with 5-star ratings and Google know you have very few online reviews they won’t show your star ratings in the search results page. Be honest on your review numbers and average ratings.

This is one of the more complicated schema markups to implement so don’t get scared and run away just yet. If you can’t figure it out try skipping it and moving onto the next 2. Once you have done them you might have a better understanding to be able to implement this one.

Local Business Markup

What it does: Local business markup tells google about your basic business details.

While this doesn’t change your listing much in Google it will build your trust with them. This is because having a consistent name, address, business hours, phone number etc.. across your website, social accounts, Google My Business listing and online directories build Googles confidence in what your business is about.

Google’s confidence and trust in a website are used as ranking factors.

Fill out the rest of the settings (you can leave the Geo settings and price range empty). If you want to know your business geo location visit. www.latlong.net.

Hit save.

Manual setup:

If you don’t have a WordPress website there are 2 ways to manually setup Local Business Markup.

Option 1 is using itemprop in your footer:

Use this method if you already display your business details in the footer of your website.

Simply add an itemprop to the HTML of each piece of information to tell Google what it refers to and wrap it in a div with itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness". As you can see in the example below.

The Yoast plugin applies it to your website automatically when you run through its configuration wizard setup process (Yoast > General > Configuration Wizard).

To apply it with the JSON Schema Markup plugin, simply install the plugin > go to the plugin settings > select ‘Organisation’ > check ‘Enable’ & output on homepage > fill out as many fields as you can > hit save.

Hard steps to apply (manual setup):

If you don’t have a WordPress website then follow the steps below.

Paste the following code into the HTML body of your homepage and fill out the CAPITAL LETTER sections inside the qutation marks with your businesses info without removing any quotation marks.

Note: Not all info needs to be there. You can take some sections out if you don’t have the info or you would like to keep it private (such as your address if you don’t have a store location).

Breadcrumb Markup

What it does: Shows URLs in google as breadcrumbs instead of directly displaying the URL.

For example, a normal URL of ‘your-site.com.au/commercial-plumber/frankston’ will show as ‘your-site.com.au > Commercial Plumber > Frankston’.

You can see in the image below the structure of the Green URL is different for eventbrite.com.au.

This isn’t the biggest difference and isn’t worth applying if you have to do it manually. The only time this is worth adding is if you have WordPress and a schema plugin already installed that applies it with the click of a button.

Setup steps:
If you have been adding schema with the JSON Schema Markup plugin then you can go to the plugin settings > select ‘Breadcrumb’ > check ‘Enable’ & output on all pages > hit save.

Again, personally, I only think this is worth the time if it only takes the click of a button to activate. The return you will get for the time spent manually applying it to every page might not be worth it.

If you don’t have a WordPress website you will need to replace the target (http://www.YOUR-SITE.com.au/?s={search_term_string}) and query-input (required name=search_term_string) lines with the right parameters for your website’s site search functionality.